If there’s one company in particular who’s eager to get their hands on new Apple products, it would be manufacturer Pegatron Technology. A new report claims the supplier has landed the contract for the new iPhone, while competitor Foxconn will build a seven-inch iPad.
DigiTimes is reporting that Pegatron Technology will be manufacturing two of Apple’s biggest products for the fourth quarter: The next iPhone as well as a mysterious “10-inch iPad to be launched in the fourth quarter.”
“Pegatron has already finished expanding its equipment and labor force for Apple’s orders,” sources close to the Taiwan-based supply chain maker reveal. The same sources pinpoint a September release for this year’s iPhone, which would be a month earlier than last year’s iPhone 4S.
To ramp up for Apple’s products, Pegatron is shifting its focus elsewhere. “To mainly focus on Apple’s orders, Pegatron has also internally decided to downsize its SI motherboard department and to shift resources to Apple’s orders,” sources claim. “Since Asustek has been reducing its motherboard orders to Pegatron, while gross margins are also rather low, the shifting in resources is expected to benefit Pegatron in its operations.”
The report also casually notes that rival manufacturer Foxconn Electronics will be building a seven-inch iPad for Apple due for release in August — despite Cupertino’s continued insistence that they have no interest in building such a device.
Now, do we have to remind you about taking rumors like too seriously again? Grain of salt, people… grain of salt…
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Despite the popularity of the iPhone, viewing its otherwise stellar display outdoors can often be a challenge, particularly in bright sunlight. Nokia has taken advantage of this weakness to market its new Lumia 900 Windows Phone handset, and now independent research appears to back up those claims.
DisplayMate Technologies Corporation has published the results of a new Bright Ambient Lighting Shoot-Out, which pits nine popular smartphones and tablets against each other to see which one performs best in the great outdoors.
“Tablets and Smartphones are seldom viewed in the dark,” explains Dr. Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate. “While they all look about the same in the dark, as the Ambient Lighting levels increase, particularly outdoors, there are dramatic differences in screen viewability between models. We evaluated 4 Tablets and 5 Smartphones under a wide range of ambient lighting (0 to 40,000 lux) and include both Lab Measurements and Viewing Test Screen Shots to objectively compare the units.”
Although the current iPhone 4S wasn’t among the test subjects, the previous iPhone 4 tied for second place with the original Samsung Galaxy S. Nokia’s Lumia 900 landed firmly in the top spot with a Contrast Rating for High Ambient Light (CR HAL) rating of 90.
“This results from a combination of its high screen Brightness and low screen Reflectance, which Nokia calls ClearBlack technology,” Dr. Ray elaborates. By comparison, the iPhone 4 had a CR HAL rating of 77, while the Samsung Galaxy S fared a bit better at 80.
The larger screen of tablets makes for a much more challenging problem with ambient light. Soneira notes that even the best tablets “all performed a notch below the smartphones,” with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in first place with a CR HAL rating of 57 and the iPad 2 in second place with 47. (The new iPad wasn’t included in this shoot-out, but Soneira notes that it does perform better than last year’s model.)
Claiming that “all manufacturers need to pay much more attention to their display performance in high ambient lighting because that is frequently how they are used,” Dr. Ray notes that the other pair of tablets performed considerably more dismally than the top two, with Amazon’s Kindle Fire at CR HAL 24 and the Motorola Xoom at a mere 20.
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No longer the exclusive iPhone carrier, AT&T is frequently knocked as a poor carrier with lousy wireless service, but if you ask their CEO, it sounds a bit like the customers are the ones taking advantage of them.
The New York Times published an interesting report over the weekend which sheds some light on controversial decisions made by AT&T, such as ditching the unlimited data plans that made the iPhone so popular in the first place. As it turns out, the company’s CEO would have made the move much earlier — or in hindsight, maybe not at all.
“My only regret was how we introduced pricing in the beginning, because how did we introduce pricing? Thirty dollars and you get all you can eat,” AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said during an on-stage interview last week at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference. “And it’s a variable cost model. Every additional megabyte you use in this network, I have to invest capital.”
Unlimited data plans have been dead for nearly two years now, and the capped packages that replaced them are clearly working out for the carrier, who reported .1 billion in revenue from mobile data alone in Q1 2012 — particularly since 70 percent of the people using them are “paying for the more expensive options.”
Stephenson is equally regretful about “disruptive” new technologies such as Apple’s iMessage or Microsoft’s Skype, both of which the CEO consider a threat to their current business.
“You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model,” the CEO elaborated. “Apple iMessage is a classic example. If you’re using iMessage, you’re not using one of our messaging services, right? That’s disruptive to our messaging revenue stream.”
These complaints aside, Stephenson has no such regrets about the “unique opportunity” to become the first carrier for the iPhone — despite the company’s board of directors being nervous about the handset possibly transforming the carrier’s business model.
“I remember asking the question: Are we investing in a business model, are we investing in a product or are we investing in Steve Jobs?” Stephenson concludes. “The answer to the question was, you’re investing in Steve Jobs. Let’s go after this thing. And we went after it, and the rest is history.”
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Samsung is back for more, today introducing the third generation of its Galaxy S smartphones with an impossibly large 4.8-inch display and a handful of the iPhone’s best features (such as a Siri knockoff) thrown in for good measure. Gee, maybe they actually like getting dragged into patent court all the time? At least Apple can’t say the Korean manufacturer is stealing their screen size. With that in mind, let’s jump into the rest of the day’s news for Thursday, May 3, 2012.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire made quite a splash out of the gate last November, but according to new data released by IDC, the flame appears to have mostly been snuffed out by the release of the new iPad. Overall, the tablet market dropped 38.4 percent in the first quarter of this year, a bit more than IDC’s previous prediction of 34 percent. Total tablet sales hit 17.4 million, but Apple’s iPad nabbed 11.8 million of those for a 68 percent market share, which didn’t leave many potential customers for competitors to mop up. After grabbing 16.8 percent of the tablet market late last year with the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s darling dropped to third place with a mere four percent share in Q1 2012, bumped out of second place by Samsung. Lenovo ranked fourth, and Barnes & Noble sopped up the rest of the market for fifth place.
It certainly took long enough, but the first iPad-only newspaper The Daily has finally made the leap to the smaller screen of the iPhone and iPod touch. Even better, the subscription pricing has similarly gotten a downsizing at only .99 per month or .99 per year. iPad users won’t get those cheaper rates, but they do get a small bonus: Free access to the iPhone edition as part of their 99-cent per week or .99 per year tablet subscription.
App developers are about to have some expanded options when it comes to offering their apps internationally, as iTunes Connect has announced 10 new languages: Traditional Chinese, Norwegian, Turkish, Finnish, Danish, Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, and Greek. “Now you have more ways to reach millions of users around the world,” the developer news website notes today. “We have expanded language support in iTunes Connect, so you can localize app metadata, keywords, and screenshots in 10 new languages.” Sadly, we don’t speak a single one of those, but it should be good news for customers in those regions.
We’re not likely to see a new iPhone again until October, but Samsung is taking advantage of the lull in Apple’s schedule by introducing the third chapter in its flagship Android smartphone line. The Samsung Galaxy S III has been officially unveiled at an event today, with a whopping 4.8-inch Super AMOLED display featuring a 1280×720 resolution. Despite being 20 percent larger than the iPhone 4S, the GS3 is actually lighter and thinner, and even includes a Siri-esque feature Samsung has called the “S Voice.” The handset won’t be available in North America until this sunny summer, but begins an international rollout on May 29 in Europe before moving on to Asia. Aside from the enormous tablet-sized display, the handset is noteworthy for bundling 50GB of Dropbox storage for two years as well as an exclusive app: Flipboard for Android, which will eventually roll out to other handsets as well. Oh, and the Korean manufacturer claims the GS3 is “designed for humans” — at least those with hands beefy enough to hold it, that is. And just try to watch the GS3 commercial without making a smart-aleck remark — we dare you!
Looks like iPhone rumor season is in full swing again, with iLounge publishing a number of tidbits on what we might see come October. Fans of that mocked-up teardrop-shaped iPhone 5 design that made the rounds last year will be disappointed to hear that the next iPhone is likely going to retain a similar look to the existing iPhone 4S, but shed 2mm in thickness and get stretched out by 10mm in height to create a larger 4-inch display. The more bizarre part of this dubious rumor suggests that “a metal panel” will be added to the center of the back of the otherwise Gorilla Glass-covered handset. The website likens it to the current iMac generation, but we say it’s just butt-ugly. Finally, in keeping with a volley of other rumors, iLounge is also predicting the 30-pin dock connector will get a big shrinky-dink with a smaller “pill shape” hole. Do we need to remind you yet again about getting your hopes up too much with these rumors? We didn’t think so.
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Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A manufacturer specializing in Android handsets unleashes a dizzying torrent of models to confuse customers, then blames a steep drop in net profit on one device sold by a rival.
Reuters is reporting that HTC’s 70 percent fall in net profit in Q1 2012 can only be blamed on one thing: Apple’s iPhone 4S. The Taiwanese handset manufacturer has failed to keep pace with both Apple and rival Android handset maker Samsung, and now the financials have come home to roost.
“A major challenge we faced last year was the big drop in sales in the U.S. because of competition from the iPhone 4S,” explained CEO Peter Chou on Tuesday during a briefing with analysts.
As recently as last year, more than 50 percent of HTC’s fortunes came from the United States, where the company has offered a dizzying array of models spread across all four major carriers. A big chunk of Android’s growth spurt can be linked to the success of HTC and Korean rival Samsung, whose Galaxy device line is another thorn in the side of the Taiwan company.
“This is a difficult war; the market will be focusing more and more on HTC’s profit and value,” explains analyst Dale Gai from Barclays Capital. “HTC has said it will return to normal levels, but I don’t think it will be able to go back.”
Chou also seems to feel that its best U.S. days are now behind HTC, with 1.5 million USD net profits for the first quarter, just behind analyst predictions. The manufacturer is in the process of rolling out its new HTC One line which aims to simplify the company’s product offerings.
“I feel that HTC is being reborn this year, in terms of product strategy and execution of global sales and marketing,” Chou said. “We are a new HTC; HTC One will help us to reach this goal.”
Of course, Samsung and Apple won’t exactly be sitting still this year — a new flagship Galaxy S III handset appears imminent from the Korean company, and the rumored iPhone 5 is likely to appear in October from Cupertino as well.
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(Image courtesy of LaptopMag.com)
